Cities of Refuge

by Michael Helm

  And then we find a shard. By night, above us, the lights of heaven, or by day, some mercy extended, some selflessness full of meaning, and upon witnessing such a soul, we feel the very substance of – the message ended, he called back – We have our proof in those rare others. We have our shard, Rosemary. We take possession of it, carry it in our pocket, rub it with a thumb. In time, yes, it wears away, people fail us, people we most trust, and whatever it was we once held disappears, becomes a memory, and so we examine our memory, we wonder at its nature, and see that it deceives us, at times, and so we’re lost again, wondering if we truly ever held this knowledge, this shard of the original ongoing moment, of the godhead. We promise ourselves that, should we find another, we’ll mark ourselves with it, we’ll cut its shape into our skin. And so by longing we’re blinded to our true condition, that we are already marked, marks we not only fail to read but fail to see. Unless, perhaps, something should remind us, should truly remind us, that there is meaning outside of our making, that the details of the real world deserve our full attention, that we’re witness to daily miracles – however cheapened the language of saying so (how ingeniously the corruption spreads in language, rotting the very form by which we lone, trapped souls reach out to one another, and sapping the beauty from unsayability itself). And that, though the weight we bear is the weight of all, and though we cannot truly know the pain we witness, any pain greater than our own, we can nevertheless know love, a greater love, this is its advantage, and we can aspire to it. If compassion is what Bergson calls “aspiration downwards,” if it requires our imagination, then love for those outside our given circle of loving requires it too.

  Here I am with my orders and my Holy Bible, reading again to the end, growing old. Every day is a reclaiming against the world outside my window, in chaos even in those places it desperately strives not to be. Maybe these events could not be Authored. But remember, dear Rosemary, that even the end of this unsigned world has the Maker’s mark on every page.

  The state had no name.

  She had a memory she couldn’t place from her girlhood of the moment when she understood herself to be separate from her parents, them in the front seat, her in the back, and the sure thing they’d been, the three of them, lost on a frozen prairie road she could still see curving into river hills. Long ago she’d lost history and god. She kept losing god without once getting god back.

  It began with a scene on the lawn, their own front lawn. Donald had come outside and everything about him said that her mother was dead and so she was already there in the knowledge of one parent’s death when he had to bring her out far enough to tell her it was Harold, not Marian. His name sent her wandering out of the yard at an angle to nowhere, and Donald trailed her into the street, thinking he was explaining, when she fell. She fell all the way to the country, to Lana’s, where the doctors still made house calls. For some days Donald was the only one not medicated. The doctor was very tall and thin, an old man with huge hands. Kim asked for more drugs and said she didn’t want to know their names, and he wrote out the dosages and handed the instructions to Donald, and then sent her half out of being.

  A nameless state, cottoned, neither waking nor sleeping. When she felt the rising to time-place, she tricked herself to drop away again by following little things to their ends. Something like an ice cube, call it an ice cube, runnelling from a crested summer street to a gutter and sliding to a grate, dropping through, from dim to dark passageways running on, losing its very self, then suddenly shooting out into light again for some brief dying moment, into the thing it was, water falling inside water with no border between them.

  Following voices, near or trailing, administering, but not letting them form into sense upon sense. Beneath the voices, a streaming she’d known once before, without music or echo, not coloured or pleasing or solemn or one thing so much like another.

  Her hand in air became a bird of prey tracing sky, and in time she was her hand, waiting for seeing to become hunger, for wanting to become desire, and then a movement in the grasses below wrenched her into another form that cast her down full of all-things-in-the-balance and the ground rushed up.

  She came down enough to see that someone had bought pyjamas for her. The sleeve across her pillow, striped light blue and a sort of meringue, a sky-and-clouds colour that sent her following the light tracking across a country yard, coming and going, and rain, water again, and then returning in evening to fire in the trees, setting them alight with markings until they all read as one equation that held true forward and backward: she had ended him, he had ended her. She had only to remove the variable she was to render this truth beyond mattering.

  There was yet no stability, they said, just lapsing in and out, and upon one of these lapses she had the last vision, cold and clear. A bluntness is watching a dark street in summer. The city is weakly playing at sense. The selected one approaches along the draw. For moments at a time in the watching the bluntness is bent away from itself to some undernature and it feels its deep wilderness mind, moving, intent, fully itself, crossing through bush, over saplings, crossing road into encampment, wilderness mind, two thousand miles to the west. And then at once it’s back, in the alien space of this same dark street, somewhere nearby, in the folds of the sheet, waiting for her. And she is going to it.

  She will come to think that she remembers what happens next but she won’t for a very long time. Until one day, when she’s old, she’ll forget what happens next in the vision, though what happens next is everything and always. What happens next is what is.

  All of this, by some counts, passed in eleven days.

  Donald arranged the service. Kim sat with her mother, absent, among strangers in a small chapel. She had to be told when to walk out.

  In the days following, back home, there came hours with the television. Vertical desserts, clever cartoons, strong men pulling truck rigs, soldiers real and fake, sterilization in Puerto Rico, space-saving tips for the closet. Her body, she’d worked at it for so long, had closed back down. Words failed to be recalled. It was all happening again and she had to stand, get up off the couch and literally stand, or fall. For a week she ate almost nothing and had never been so heavy.

  It would have to begin, the next recovery, as a kind of show. For Marian, for Donald. For herself, given that they’d all know it wasn’t real, the dark humour, the sure movements around the house, the half-lively voice she used on the phone. It would begin as a show and at some point become real, or seem so, which would be enough.

  She would examine her actions and find them loving or cruel, she didn’t know which. Confronting him, conducting her researches. Sending him the letter she’d written to herself, beguiled by a moment of hope. And then, as if knowing her Santiago story had presumed too much, had stolen from him, she’d sent the video link, casting after her presumption an act of redress that, in the end, redressed nothing. Whatever she would find, looking back, she’d impose a reading that would keep her free of ruin. She had a secret she would never tell. She was culpable or she wasn’t. It was true, he had lived inside an ambiguity, whatever it was, and had died inside another, and bequeathed it to her. Only now, facing facts, were the contradictions of her heart apparent to her. At one moment it seemed she’d acted only for his sake, and at the next to prove that he had lied to her so that he might admit all of his past, including that which had shaped her. She’d loved him and she wanted to hurt him. She saw it all, and saw how she deceived herself to think that her actions were passionate and principled, driven by moral instinct, rather than calculated upon her old pains. And then it seemed she was granting the old pains too much of herself, and that there might have been a way through for both of them.

  At some point she just said fuck it. She turned off the TV and began reading. Then she went through nineteen days of uncollected email. Five people had sent sympathetic e-cards, two of the cards were the same.

  Eduardo said Eyzaguirre had offered to look at a photo. She knew where to
find one from ’74, but declined their further help.

  In time, by turns, Greg and Shenny came through as they could. The idea was to resocialize her. Greg visited once, then took her out with a friend named Winston and the three of them went to an oyster bar that in the twenties had been a garment district sweatshop, the original machine layout marked with dozens of vestigial floorbolts that sent ever more customers stumbling as the night wore on. Winston was a short, round man, with narrow designer glasses that seemed to frame more than his eyes, his whole literate, avid bearing. He seemed like someone Kim should have known a long time but she suspected she’d never see him again. That Greg had people like Winston in his life opened her idea of him. Shenny took her to a spa with a woman named Parmja, a film reviewer with a gender politics slant who made a kind of sport out of over-informed commentary. On both occasions Kim ended up describing an article she imperfectly recalled on evolutionary biology and religious belief. The feeling of an ordering mystery beyond us could be explained by the human mechanisms for agent detection, causal reasoning, social cognition, and god formed there in the spandrels. She said, “God’s just a place in the physical brain.” The heretical sense of it should have played well, but her friends and acquaintances, godless all, said almost nothing, as if she was presenting them her crisis of faith.

  Which she was, she supposed.

  One evening she was downtown walking west into a sun bowing down and came upon a movie lineup wrapping around a corner for a block and a half as hundreds spilled out from the early show, some of them mulling under the marquee, forcing others into the traffic, and the cars patiently waiting, and from her vantage across the street she saw the teeming shape, the massing and the long tail, and in the high murmuring heard her name called from somewhere. Even from a slight distance she couldn’t see far past the edges, over the heads. She turned, turned away really, and looked through the open windows of a restaurant where her attention was caught by a young woman alone at a table, not ten feet from the street but seemingly miles from the throng, flat-boned, Russian-looking, staring at her glass of wine, lost there, and Kim saw her, this woman she didn’t know, as someone’s daughter. Then her name, called again, and she almost walked away, a part of her wanted away, but instead she drifted across the street and into the crowd and again her name on the air – it was Harold calling her and she thought she would cry but she didn’t – and then she stopped hearing it and the moment it hit her that he was gone a hand fell on her shoulder and she turned to see a man she knew, she knew him well, though the how and who escaped her, and he said he’d been thinking about her because something had opened up and he wondered if she needed work.

  And like that it all came back, his name, the day of the week, the place she was, what she needed. And she thought that she’d been wrong, that she’d just missed it when it happened this way, that a divinity or whatever came to her upon seeming accidents like this, in the play of chance on a noisy city street in the fall. Maybe it was less than god, but it was more than luck. It was certainly mystery, a small, conferred radiance. Because the city gives you this, too. One day it tries to kill you and another it finds you and hauls you clear and gives you something not entirely rational to believe in. Like that healing mysteries didn’t fall on you but rose up, drawn forth simply by your paying attention to the lives of others. That you had anything to do with it, this feeling, these mysteries, was one of those illusions that worked, that served, so necessary that it had force, and so became real.

  The man – his name was Ryland something, Ryland Coombs – he knew a woman in Central America who was looking for someone like Kim, a writer and speaker of languages, to help with the work she’d be starting in January. It was a chance to be a part of an international team. He said, “Think about it.” And so at home that night she thought of the mountains and cities to the far south, and when she began whispering in her thoughts the names of those in need, she was the nine-year-old converted for the winter by the maid in Mexico City – yes, she remembered it now, that city, a lost place that had been returned to her – the maid who’d told her of miracles, and now as then she brought her hands together, palm to palm, as if still holding what had already escaped her grasp.

  On what Marian felt would be her last good day, a dark young woman appeared at the door, holding a crimson and yellow shoulder bag. She was about to be canvassed or solicited, and she waited for the girl to see that she was in no shape for petitioning.

  “Hello. I’m Teresa.”

  “No, thank you, dear.”

  “You’re Marian, yes?”

  She’d forgotten the arrangement. She had no head for arrangements lately. Even when she had had one, she’d learned to reject the whole idea of them.

  She and Teresa took tea on the back deck, waiting for Kim to show. The sky was clear but not deep. The blue that greeted the eye was not the blue of years past, but the dimming was not hers, she felt. It was cool so they shifted their chairs into the sun and without being asked to or making a fuss about it, Teresa tucked the blanket behind Marian to cover the small of her back. The girl talked easily but not too much. Upon only two questions she explained that she’d met Kim through a mutual friend, her former lawyer (this would be Kim’s Greg, though that was already “half-ended,” Kim had said). She said openly that she was in the country illegally and hoped to stay here and “make a life.” The arrangement, as Marian now recalled, had Teresa here on weekday afternoons, while Kim worked her part-time job, proofing copy at the CBC. In cash terms there’d be no net gain to the household, but Kim needed the time away from her, though she wouldn’t say so. And this Teresa needed the money.

  The girl wore a thin tunic that looked as if it were stitched out of decorative tea towels. There was a name for it Marian might once have known.

  “What has Kim told you about me?” The young woman hesitated. “I know she’s told you I’m sick, but do you know exactly what the work will involve?”

  “I know, yes.”

  “Have you done this before?”

  “Yes. I looked after my mother.”

  “Was she dying?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. So you know what’s ahead of us.”

  When the phone rang Teresa asked if she could answer. The question confused Marian and she didn’t respond and Teresa went inside and took the call. It was just that it was backwards, the guest answering the phone. Marian had to remind herself that she wasn’t a host.

  Teresa brought her the phone. Kim said she was sorry, that she’d be late. She was still waiting to see Harold’s estate lawyer.

  “Why is he always running late?”

  “I’m spending my life in this waiting room, just me and the expired magazines. I can tell you a lot about burrowing owls. Do you like Teresa? Say ‘Tuesday’ if you do.”

  “I Tuesday very much.”

  “Good. I think she’s wonderful.”

  When she ended the call Marian looked at the phone receiver. She ran her finger lightly over the number pad, as if her touch could hold there and surprise her daughter some day in the future when Kim was ordering Thai or phoning a plumber. Kim called again half an hour later to say she had to go straight to work, and Marian and Teresa moved to the living room and began to tidy, though this was not part of the arrangement. Teresa said it was all the same work, and she liked doing it, and so they went over the method for dealing with Donald’s papers. Marian lay on the couch and explained that they were never to be stacked together. The ones on the coffee table were to be moved to his desk in the study, all others to the shelf inside the hutch. When Teresa took the pages from the mantel a stray condolence card fell to the floor. Marian asked for it. It was from Rosa and Tom, the Lams, old acquaintances from Montreal whom they hadn’t seen since Kim was six. They’d heard the news and were very sorry for her loss. Of course they’d heard the news. It travelled even among far-off strangers. Professor Found Dead in Ditch had become Professor Likely Struck by Train had become Fallen fr
om Train had become High Alcohol Levels in Professor Found Dead by Tracks. Professor’s Death Ruled Drunken Mishap.

  She handed Teresa the card and said garbage.

  “My first husband was a sad fool.”

  She’d known it always, but knew it differently now. The circumstances of his death were ludicrous, clownish, a little slapstick, a man falling on his head at fifty miles an hour, but it was the fact of the death that cast a colder light on Harold, on all of them. All these years he’d worked like hell at the wrong things to keep his purchase and then Kim had been hurt and he started into the long slide. Or maybe it wasn’t so simple. Maybe he’d have lost purchase anyway.

  It was not a mishap. His car had been left in a cemetery.

  Teresa looked at her and then went into the kitchen, as if evading a question. It made her seem a part of the fractured family rather than a complete outsider. Maybe Teresa had heard how things had ended for Harold but so what. She’d never had to suffer him. Her connection was Kim. They were all connected through Kim. It should have made them lucky.

  When she woke, Teresa was sitting across the room, reading a book.

  “How long was I asleep?”

  “Not long. What can I do?”

  “What are you reading?”

  The girl put it back in her bag, smiling. “A silly book. My sister sends some from home.”

  “Can I see?”

  She withdrew the book and handed it to Marian. A ratty paperback with an illustrated scene of jungle mountains. On a dirt path crossing the foreground stood a young girl, looking off to the peaks. El Viaje de Mariela. The girl on the cover wore a necklace of a kind Marian had once bought somewhere in Central America or the Caribbean. She could picture herself leaving a courtyard with the necklace in hand. A first morning in a new city in the rain and when she left the market the sky had cleared and looming there was the volcano. Had the air been Spanish or Caribbean French? The necklace was jade.